Well Mouse and I got into it a long while back and while I can't remember the exact situation I am sure I posted something that came off bad and offended him so hopefully he can forgive me and we can both move on. Then with all the stupid trolling going on with users coming back under different names it just makes debates that much harder because people feel on edge.

Back to our point about personal computers while I'm not a huge Wiki fan I think this line sums it up best.

A personal computer (PC) is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator. PCs include any type of computer that is used in a "personal" manner.

Any type of computer that is used in a "personal" manner. Its not about some mystery hardware spec that is needs to meet or even a software spec. It's about what any given end users may need for their own personal use.

I am sure there needs to be some kind of line when it comes to hardware and software specs, I wouldn't exactly put a Kindle the the catagory of personal computer and in many areas I feel the iPad is really on the line because I feel this first gen product lacks some software features limited by iOS.

Its kind of like with high speed internet it has to at least meet 4mbps to be considered high speed. ATT can no longer sell 256kps and call it broadband lite. So I agree there needs to at least be a hardware and software spec met which these days shouldn't be that hard for many devices to meet.

I mostly agree, with the caveat that the hardware and software specs change so rapidly that if we try to bound the definition of Personal Computer, we will always be out of date -- hence the arguments on this thread.

PCs include any type of computer that is used in a "personal" manner.

That's a pretty good definition to my mind....

Now, what's this thing called a "computer" that everyone is talking about...

"Swift generally gets you to the right way much quicker." - auxio -

"The perfect [birth]day -- A little playtime, a good poop, and a long nap." - Tomato Greeting Cards -

-- combine the Airport Express within the iPad charger as part of the iPad package

Paint me slow but I still don't get this. I would just assume the user has wireless access (3G or 802.11n) somehow.

Quote:

You need the reinstall drive if the iPad bricks and you don't have convenient access to another computer.

Sure, but you can just revert to a baseline iOS image on a hard reset. Since the reinstall drive is going to be an old version of iOS anyway they can stick that into a protected region on the iPad and try to update after you get back to a known good state. If you can't get there or managed somehow to wipe even the protected area then you need to send it in for service.

When I say "protected area" this could be as simple as saving a good iOS image somewhere in the baseband flash. OTA updates with built in catastrophic failure recovery isn't rocket science and something even Android manages

With Mac and iPad sales combined, Apple computer sales grew 241 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2010, vaulting the company into third place in worldwide PC sales research, firm Canalys revealed on Wednesday.

With Mac and iPad sales combined, Apple shipped 11.5 million units in the holiday quarter of 2010. That was enough for the Cupertino, Calif., company to edge out Dell, which has 11.4 million units.

Apple took 10.8 percent of global PC sales, according to numbers from Canalys. And with record year-over-year growth dwarfing the rest of the industry, Apple is now within striking distance of the No. 2 worldwide manufacturer, Acer, with 13.6 million units in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The addition of iPad sales helped Apple tremendously, giving the company 241 percent growth from the same period in 2009, compared with industry-wide growth of 19.2 percent. A year prior, the company sold 3.4 million Macs.

"Any argument that a pad is not a PC is simply out of sync," said Canalys senior analyst Daryl Chiam. "With screen sizes of seven inches or above, ample processing power, and a growing number of applications, pads offer a computing experience comparable to netbooks. They compete for the same customers and will happily coexist. As with smart phones, some users will require a physical keyboard, while others will do without."

The top vendor for the quarter was HP, which sold 18.7 million units, good for 17.7 percent of the market. While HP maintained its No. 1 position, it grew sales just 2.9 percent year over year, well behind Apple, as well as the market average.

"Pads gave consumers increased product choice over the holiday season," Canalys analyst Tim Coulling said. "While they do not appeal to first-time buyers or low-income households, they are proving extremely popular as additional computing devices."

Last week, Apple revealed record sales of Macs and iPads in its quarterly earnings report. The company reported 4.13 million Mac sales, a 23 percent increase over the same period a year prior.

Apple also sold 7.33 million iPads in the holiday quarter -- the first such sales period for the touchscreen tablet, which launched in April 2010. But since its debut, the iPad, with a starting price of $499, outsold the Mac, leading one Wall Street analyst to refer to the device as Apple's "Mac of the masses."

Paint me slow but I still don't get this. I would just assume the user has wireless access (3G or 802.11n) somehow.

Sure, but you can just revert to a baseline iOS image on a hard reset. Since the reinstall drive is going to be an old version of iOS anyway they can stick that into a protected region on the iPad and try to update after you get back to a known good state. If you can't get there or managed somehow to wipe even the protected area then you need to send it in for service.

When I say "protected area" this could be as simple as saving a good iOS image somewhere in the baseband flash. OTA updates with built in catastrophic failure recovery isn't rocket science and something even Android manages

Those are both valid points.

I was just trying to cover all the nits in advance to foil the nit-pickers.

Wow... I guess I showed them!

"Swift generally gets you to the right way much quicker." - auxio -

"The perfect [birth]day -- A little playtime, a good poop, and a long nap." - Tomato Greeting Cards -

How does it sting? Is it the fact that a smart ass doesn't have a clue that when somenone is #1 there is only one place to go if they aren't careful? People have a short ass memory at times.

As good at Apple is doing their current Market Cap isn't even close to what Microsoft had years ago which I believe top 500 Billion.

Know what happens to a forest most of the time. Someone comes by and cuts it down.

WTF is wrong with you today .... have you not "gotten any" in the last little while ..... or what? A poster cracks a joke, which I thought was funny, .... I responded to HIM .... and you come back with this crap??? Extreme, as you know, you and I don't always agree, in fact, hardly ever .... but I have said in the past that you are perhaps the only poster, showing troll like behavior, that occasionally has some interesting things to say. Don't post like this and make me change my mind about you ... please. Have you lost your sense of humor???

Apple, bigger than Google, √ ..... bigger than Microsoft, √ The universe is unfolding as it should. Thanks, Apple.

Steve Jobs himself during the iPad keynote described iPad as a device which sits between a smartphone and a laptop. He called netbooks for what they are: cheap laptops with slow processors and tiny screens that aren't good for anything.

From this perspective it makes perfect sense to lump netbook sales with "traditional" PC sales but not iPad sales with Mac PC sales.

As others have said earlier the definition of what is and isn't a PC is utterly irrelevant to most people's lives, may even be irrelevant within the IT industry. What matters is what any given device can do for a particular person and their needs.

I couldn't help but wonder if years ago people were debating the difference between a cart, a wagon and a coach (two or four wheels, two, four or six horses?) during the time the first motorcycles were being introduced.

So perhaps the iPad is the motorcycle to the Windows/OS X PC horse and carts.

and comes with MobileMe Backup/Sync/Mobile Extensions tied into iTunes stores

Then the iPad will be a superior solution to first-time buyers and the iPad will be the Apple of the masses.

I say that's the wrong viewpoint. My iPad is ALREADY superior to my macbook, by virtue of it being a tablet. I can write and draw on it (Notes Plus and ArtStudio, thank you very much), vs with a macbook I cannot. I can access everything I need to access on it, without the hassle of booting up and getting out the computer. If netbooks are included in the definition, then iPads should be as well. It is already the Apple for the masses as far as I'm concerned... to think otherwise is simply to ignore reality that people want simple computing interfaces rather than complicated and feature-laden You miss the point that the iPad isn't meant to be the be-all, end-all for computing, it's meant to cover 90% of your use cases. And with that, it succeeds.

The revelation comes as somewhat of a surprise, given that Apple has now sold over 15 million iPads, while Apple TVs capable of playing Netflix have just recently sold over a million units.

Perhaps, but watching movies on the iPad is not the best experience. People have been at pains to point out how the iPad is only useful for media consumption, but I disagree. Through dedicated apps it is an incredibly useful tool for inputing data. Watching movies on the ipad is a little like reading - it is great, except the ipad is heavy and sometimes the lack of a built in stand makes it awkward. I always opt for my laptop for watching movies in bed.
Given the choice between watching a movie on the iPad on my couch, or on a TV set the TV set wins every time. There seems to be an assumption that everyone owns 52" TV's but I am not sure that is the case. Netflix on a 32" screen is fine.

... I couldn't help but wonder if years ago people were debating the difference between a cart, a wagon and a coach ...

Reminded me of a passage from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Not exactly a debate, but some degree of uncertainty regarding the nature of a particular vehicle:

Quote:

... The vehicle was not exactly a gig, neither was it a stanhope. It was not what is currently denominated a dog-cart, neither was it a taxed cart, nor a chaise-cart, nor a guillotined cabriolet; and yet it had something of the character of each and every of these machines. ...

I really hate it when people display poor reading comprehension. First of all, you are completely wrong. Secondly I said UPDATES. 3rd, no the MacBook air ships with a thumb drive containing the restore disc, and 4th it has always been able to use the super drive accessory.

And, it ships activated. Complete and total fail on your part. Next.

You are short-sighted and arbitrary in your designations. To wit:

If Apple decided to ship any of the Macs with the same limitation as the iPad you have described in your posts, by your definition, regardless of hardware, capability and configuration they would NOT be computers - specifically PCs. Sounds like nonsense? Wait there's more!

Go back to the early computers, the Timex Sinclair, the Apple 1 and ][ - they could not operate with certain peripheral devices attached, will you claim also that these were not computers/PCs? How about the early Wangs, the Imlacs, HP 9830s, the Altairs? Just because a device doesn't do exactly the same things as the desktop unit sitting before you doesn't mean it's NOT a personal computer. The capability of the iPad far outstrips any of these early devices which were personal computers. The fact that it requires a tethered activation is an arbitrary decision by Apple and in no way reflects on it's status or capability as a personal computer.

The problem here is you have artificially and arbitrarily decided in your own mind what constitutes a personal computer, (based on an arbitrary decision by Apple to require tethering to activate the OS) which doesn't leave the field wide enough to actually include many devices which are or were defined as personal computers.

But that's OK - because this is what's known as a PARADIGM SHIFT. You will not be comfortable for some time to come until you reconcile yourself to the shift and what it represents. You will continue to struggle to define things in terms which are becoming outdated and inaccurate. Only those whose minds are flexible and adaptable can see the paradigm shift for what it is. Sad thing is - I'm well past my 5th decade of existence and I have no problem seeing it for what it is. Why can't you?

It's not arbitrary. To me, the fact of having to sync changes my perception of the device the whole time I'm using it. When I create a file I'm thinking about the next sync. When I see the battery go down I'm thinking about the next sync. When I create a bookmark I'm thinking about the next sync. Sync is not an isolated thing that happens when I plug in, it is always there, effecting how I use it.

when the battery goes low, you don't think about the next sync, you think about the next charge. You can charge it by plugging it into the wall, you don't need to sync to charge.

When you create a document, why do you need to sync? Are you talking about backup? Backup is an issue with all PCs.

When I create a bookmark, contact, appointment, etc, syncing happens automatically and pretty much instantly with mobile me. I can create on any of my iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacPro, MacBook air, or my account on a couple of other computers and they sync everywhere. There is no distinction between them for syncing.

You can activate at the Apple store.

Pretty much the only time you have to have another computer is to update the OS, which is no different than installing Snow Leopard on my MacBook Air.

Question - how do you update to a new release of the OS on a netbook? How do you reinstall the OS is soemthing goes wrong? My daughter has a netbook that has no CD/DVD drive and has a corrupted copy of windows. It's been useless for months now as there appears to be no way to fix it. It sure would be nice if I could just plug it into another computer to restore it like I can with an iPad.

Question - how do you update to a new release of the OS on a netbook? How do you reinstall the OS is soemthing goes wrong? My daughter has a netbook that has no CD/DVD drive and has a corrupted copy of windows. It's been useless for months now as there appears to be no way to fix it. It sure would be nice if I could just plug it into another computer to restore it like I can with an iPad.

First I would check with the manufacturer to see if there isn't a quick restore back to original setup. If not, then you can use the usb port with a external cd drive which you can buy for 10-15 bucks or put the os installation files on a flash drive and boot from that to do a full reinstall.

I don't think the ipad, iphone, or ipod are "PCs" and my logic for this is that there is no software creation apps available for ios itself.

It's a lttle early for April fools.
If an iPad is considered a computer then so should an iPod Touch and a Sony Dash.
And netbooks can play flash and don't need to be synced to a mother computer because they ARE a computer.

my ipod touch does more than the apollo 13 spacecraft
does more in every way
the touch the rim some androids etc etc are powerful computers

MAYBE if a device contains a hard-drive and mother board its a personal computer ??

Apple now sell's over 100 million $499 DEVICES a year
than can render PAGES
that can surf the net
that can make 2 way video calls
that can stream movies
on and on

so apples market share is way higher than ADC reports
ADC also just told us pluto is not a planet